I Cannot Be Your Little Girl Anymore.

I've always been wary of identifying as a little. That childlike state of being has never been my forte, honestly, even when I was an actual little girl, I found it a distasteful fit on myself. I realise that little-identity and dynamics take many different forms and there isn't a single point of definition for them all and I see those roles fulfill thousands of people everyday and I am happy for them. For me, the issue has always been the association of cuteness (and innocence).

I refuse to be cute.

I know it sounds like I am getting hung up on a meaningless descriptor but hear me out, okay? I am not saying no one is cute and no one should want to be, I am not saying cute is an issue in and of itself, but I am saying that cute is an excellent stand-in for the kind of adjectives that are routinely used to infantalize and diminish women. I know, this shit again, but if you are fed up with women talking about the many creative ways in which sexism manifests, you should know we are fed up of talking about it as well. It's not about "cute" itself, but how "cute" is used. I had a colleague, a decade ago, who used to call my projects "cute little crusades," as if we weren't being paid for the same job. I have had the older men and women in my life call me "cute" the moment they saw me behave in a way that deviated from my usually composed, confident, black-clad self, in order to enforce the message that my "inner cuteness" is the softness that resides inside all women. Cute is a gateway to that and that notion makes me so mad I bring it up all the fucking time.

It's not just that, there are so many strange ways in which "cute" is used. Sometimes men will see me playing with a knife and call it cute. Sometimes it's used to enforce this message that whether I like it or not, I am being viewed in this soft, affectionate light. Sometimes women say it to each other when they hate that they like something about you. I am sure some of this is an exaggerated reception to the word on my behalf, but cute is not really the problem, it's how we view women once we have successfully infantalized them. It's hard for some people, a lot of them are men, to view women as easily as adult as they are and it makes them more comfortable when women behave like they would want all women to behave. Like adorable, helpless creatures who need their protection and an enforced bedtime (and again, the issue is not women who opt for this because it's what they like, it's people who see any woman who puts on pigtails as their idea of a little). I don't want to appear like that to any man, ever, not even within a personalised sexual space. The identification as a little (and sometimes even as a submissive/slave) makes women like me easier to handle for certain people and while that is no reason for anyone to sacrifice their identity, it actually isn't my identity, so I experiment with it sometimes and every single time I introduce myself as "little identifying" to a person, they treat me like a fucking child. Random strangers suddenly feel comfortable teaching you about life, asking you when your bedtime is, they talk down to you as if your identity as a grown ass human being is secondary to the self-identification as a role. People who are usually uncomfortable communicating with me because I am "aggressive" (ie: code for women who won't be demure so you can feel smarter and stronger), are nice to me when I present as little. It makes me uncomfortable.

And a lot of that's about me.

A lot of it is actually because I am defensive about my "adulthood" and constantly trying to prove that I am so good at being an adult. I was never afforded a childhood so I must believe that it is somehow more dignified or noble for me to behave like I am above it. In reality I am not above it, I am unable to access a space that is enthusiastically vulnerable and genuinely open to protection (without feeling like it is activating a power struggle) so I choose to believe there never was a child in me because the alternate explanation, the one that would suggest I am just envious of the people who are truly able to access that space in themselves and the ones who actually got to experience it in their lives, is a bit sad. There is truth there though, I am disproportionately bothered by being called or seen as cute, innocent or childlike, and it's because I know how I grew up, and in that portion of my life there was no space for childishness or cuteness. Nothing but abject maturity was allowed and to tell me now, when I am three-decades into a lifestyle of defensive responsibility and maturity, that you see my innocence and cuteness, makes me want to strangle you because I myself am part of the problem. I, myself, wouldn't be able to take myself seriously if I behaved in "cute" or emotionally vulnerable ways.

It's also just not me.

There is some struggle to accepting that as well. Sometimes it feels like I am being told by the people in my life that I am a robot because I don't act out of volatile emotionality, emotional vulnerability or throw tantrums. My inability to express emotional responses has caused people in my life to treat me terribly and have the convenient excuse of "but you don't even have emotions" or "you don't even feel bad about anything" to justify their behaviour. I have felt the pressure to perform a softness just so that people will get off my back and at one point i genuinely believed this softness was real. It's not necessarily related to the "little" identity for everyone but I think in my head all that is vulnerable in a person is their childlike state of being and the way I would express "littleness" is by being openly and unmeasuredly emotionally responsive.

I have done that.

There was a brief period in my relationship with my husband when I allowed myself some littleness. It came naturally, I didn't really force it and I think that is because he is the only man I have ever trusted. I trust women at the drop of a hat and it takes a lot for them to lose that trust but it's different with men. I met him at a point in my life when I was completely disillusioned by men, even a little scared of them, they had done some shit and the audacity was just alarming. I was shocked by how much I trusted him. I will let men do fucked up shit to me because I know I got this, I don't need to trust men to get myself out alive, but I let him do the most basic and benign things in the world to me, because I trust him. Not to take care of me, but to not think less of me because I want him to take care of me. Not to protect me, but to not think of me as less capable than him because I buried myself in his arms. I cannot deny there was something deeply liberating about being able to occupy that space, one where it was okay to get hurt and *show it* while being assured that no one thought less of you for doing so. Especially at a time when I was genuinely hurting more than I ever had before and had no mechanism to comprehend my pain.

It was a brief and wonderful period of our relationship.

But it's mostly over.

That's much less sad than it sounds. There are aspects of emotional vulnerability that I can now just display to him without having to occupy a childlike space, I can do it as an adult woman and not think less of myself, which can only be described as growth. However, the actual reason is that, it was never me, it was a space I needed to occupy because I am a moron at expressing and processing my emotions and I needed some form of insurance policy that guaranteed that it would not count against me if I behaved like a human being for a minute. As I get older, I realise that I don't want to occupy any little space, it is much more important for me to not be infantalized, even within a safe space, than to experiment with a role that doesn't even quite fit. I am really not saying that anyone who does is infantilizing themselves or that it's a bad thing, it just makes me uncomfortable to do it to myself because my only focus is the social environment in which I am doing it. I can only see how much I hate it when people treat me like a "little". Inside my bedroom, I am happy to play extremely distasteful daddy games, but it's not an identity, it's a sexual role that gratifies some truly sick urges and even within those urges I cannot play games of parental enforcement, discipline, protection or kindness.

I just cannot be a little anymore, in any way.

And honestly, it's perfectly fine. People grow out of roles. People take on roles and realise they don't fit. People discover that something can be a wonderfully fulfilling lifestyle for someone else but not for you. You may learn that the indentity you thought you were suppressing was really just an urge you were misunderstanding. I can see how how my temporary affinity to dd/lg dynamics was about learning to make peace with having emotions and accepting that I didn't have to have as many or the same emotions as other people. It was about accepting vulnerability and being okay with it. But unlike those who truly find themselves within this role, for me it was a temporary fix, a crutch even, and I am grateful for it, but I don't need it anymore. I haven't needed it in a long time.

I groweded up.  

(Sorry, couldn't resist)